CBS.MarketWatch.com

The company's executives are in a tiff with shareholders. A board-appointed panel Tuesday said it rejected a $17.50 management offer to buy the company and essentially take it private.

Well, an Internet chat room has sprung up around the profitable company's woes. One shareholder, Edward Spiegel, says the online forum has 84 members and may have influenced corporate decisions at Integrated Circuit Systems (ICST)
icst
.

At http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/icst, the club started a letter-writing campaign to the board, and Spiegel says the campaign resulted in the board appointing an outside public relations firm.

"Using the Internet as our tool, we were able to solicit and recruit the former CEO of ICS, Dr. Stav Prodromou, to put together an alternate slate of directors," Spiegel told me. "It's really an incredible story, and yes, the price of ICS stock is rising."

The stock at 14 or so Tuesday is well off its low of 6 1/2 set Aug. 30. Yet a year ago, shares of Integrated Circuit Systems, which has a facility in California's Silicon Valley, sold for north of 40.

Online forums are becoming a popular feature of Internet portals. So are community Web sites, which are spun by companies such as www.theglobe.com, which is attempting an IPO this week, www.angelfire.com, which is owned by search engine Lycos (LCOS)
lcos
, and www.xoom.com.

"I am amazed what a group of determined shareholders are able to do using the Internet," Prodromou told me.

Earnings for the Integrated Circuit Systems are expected to be about 30 cents a share for the quarter that closed Sept. 30. That would be down about 20 percent from a year ago.

Integrated Circuit Systems on Tuesday said a special committee of the board of directors "determined not to pursue the possible buyout by the financial group led by management based on, among other things, the advice of the committee's financial adviser that a possible offer by the management group in the range of up to $17.50 per share would not be fair to the shareholders."

Current CEO Henry Boreen said in a statement he accepted the decision and was "committed to the company.''

No mention of the online shareholder activists there. But it's what Spiegel and his online shareholder group have been saying for some time -- if in somewhat harsh language.

"These guys are pathological," one shareholder in the chat room remarked. "The sooner we boot them, the sooner we get to plus-$23."

The online forum's shareholder rants and raves, in this case, are on Yahoo (YHOO)
yhoo
. On Monday alone, the Integrated Circuit Systems site received 6,296 page views.

Multiply that type of activity by, say, 9,000 publicly traded companies in the U.S. stock market, and you can see why Yahoo's market capitalization is north of $11 billion.

Informix update: California database developer Informix (IFMX)
ifmx
, its shares under seige as sales slip, is scheduled to report third quarter results on Wednesday, with analysts expecting earnings of about 7 cents per share. One investment professional with close ties to the company tells me the company will report as much as 12 cents a share in net income. If the company does hit 12 cents, the Nasdaq-traded shares are likely to move above their current price of 5. Options trading in Informix has been very active this week. (After the market closed, Informix reported 10 cents a share. See the story.)

Philosophy -- it's not for me: Jamie Kiggen, Internet analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin Jenrette, is getting philosophical about Internet stock valuations. Kiggen says in his latest report that most folks view calculations about the value of money-losing Internet companies as "so many leaky boats on an ocean of wishes."

Kiggen, who may or may not have studied Shakespeare at university, says he's out to "save as many (investors) as possible from the oozy deep." He says the central strength of any consumer marketing company "is its ability to attract, retain and profitably service a set of customers. This notion is every bit as true for Internet companies like AOL (AOL)
aol
, Yahoo!, and Amazon (AMZN)
AMZN, +0.53%
as it is for mainstream consumer marketing companies like American Express (AXP)
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, Disney (DIS)
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and Wal-Mart (WMT)
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."

Kiggen says he's been comparing Internet companies to consumer marketers for some time now. More importantly, he promises to stop the imagery "while we're still one metaphor away from sounding like Louis Rukeyser." Oh, Jamie, shall we compare thee to a summer's day? Or to another Internet analyst, perchance?

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